A recent announcement reveals that ZigBee is expanding into the telecom market with a new initiative which would extend mobile telephone networks, leading to new capabilities for mobile phone users.

A new ZigBee Telecom Profile is designed to feature secure mobile payment, information delivery, health care monitoring, peer-to-peer small data sharing and other location based services and features.

Target mobile devices include mobile telephones and personal digital assistants, with embedded ZigBee technology or using a ZigBee subscriber identity module (SIM) card.
Read more here.

STMicroelectronics has published its latest issue of the ST Journal of Research focusing on Wireless Sensor Networks. Previous issues, similarly focused on a particular technology theme, have presented details on the Company’s advanced research efforts on MEMS and Multimedia Streaming Technologies.

The editors of the ST Journal of Research have collected eleven technical papers addressing both system overviews and specific design topics. In the system overview arena, this issue covers ad-hoc networking technologies for WSN, radio-frequency issues, the integration of WSNs with the Internet, the mass-market adoption of Zigbee(TM) solutions, techniques for source and node localization and the usage of WSN and MEMS for posture and activity recognition. Papers on specific design solutions cover a broad spectrum: the impact of impulsive interference on network throughput and energy consumption, medium-access control schemes in the IEEE 802.15.4a standard, solutions for the trade-off between power consumption and die area, and the usage of elliptic curve cryptography coprocessors for security issues.

The ST Journal of Research aims to facilitate knowledge sharing and exchange on key research issues, methodologies, and solutions. ST publishes its journal in electronic format and is available here.

Crossbow Technology announced the Imote2.Builder for .NET Micro Framework, the Imote2 SDK based on the Microsoft(R) .NET Micro Framework. The Imote2.Builder is the industry’s first set of tools for accelerating the development of entirely new wireless sensor applications on the Marvell PXA hardware platform on which the Imote2 is built.

Crossbow’s Imote2.Builder combined with the recently introduced Imote2 product line provides new developers with the following:

- Rapid prototyping of wireless sensor applications by creating proof of concept in hours or days, not weeks or months
- Quick, familiar debugging using Microsoft’s Visual Studio environment to shift the focus to the code, not the tools
- Built on the Marvell PXA271 XScale ARM-based microprocessor, an industry first, this platform supports applications involving data-rich problems

The new Imote2.Builder for .NET Micro Framework includes 3 Imote2 modules, 2 sensor boards, the Microsoft .NET Micro Framework SDK, an evaluation copy of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, and everything required to allow engineers and developers to quickly and seamlessly create robust wireless sensor applications. It will be available in Q3, and priced at $990. Advance sales inquiries may be directed to sales@xbow.com.

More info here.

The good folks at ZDNet are giving away a couple of Sun SPOT dev kits in exchange for doing a review. You can find more info here:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Berlind/?p=515

Recently, researchers are feeling the need for “a” sensornet architecture. We blogged about the WSNA workshop with IPSN’07 sometime back, it was the first event to bring together people interested in sensornet architectures. Below is a list of some selected papers from the workshop, you are encouraged to look at the complete program:

• A Modular Sensornet Architecture: Past, Present, and Future Directions
• Toward a Unified Radio Power Management Architecture for Wireless Sensor Networks
• An Architecture for Energy Management in Wireless Sensor Networks
  

A new italian project about wireless sensor networks in domotics (home-automation) scenarios has been launched.. This is not a product but a pilot project realized by T3LAB, a laboratory established by University of Bologna and Emilia-Romagna Region.

This project is based on the ZigBee technology and the main features are:
• Users Tracking
• Control of users activities
• Environment monitoring using specific sensors (temperature, light, humidity) and webcam
• Detection of dangerous situations for users or in the environment and management of them through alarms activation
• Detection and signaling of no-authorized people through access-control policy
• Breath acquisition
• Step counter
• Calories consumption and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) computation
• Programmable wake-up and memos

More info is available here.

A three day conference for developers who want to learn about using ZigBee technology in products. It will be held in Munich, Germany by June 18-20, 2007. Program available here.

The key objective now is to bring ZigBee technology closer to European system developers. The hands-on training sessions will be presented by some of the most active companies in the ZigBee Alliance including Ember, FreeScale, Jennic, MeshNetics and Texas Instruments.

Details and Registration.